A Chinese martial art said to date from the 13th-c, when a Taoist monk, Chang San Feng, observed a fight between a snake and a crane and devised a series of postures based on the movements of these animals from which the present forms are developed. The foundation of the art is the practice of the form, a series of 108 movements in a slow, continuous sequence, which is used as a method of meditation to harmonize the mind, body, and spirit. Each posture has several fighting applications, and weapon forms are also practised using the broad sword, straight-edged sword, and spear, which help to develop speed, stamina, and power. Studies have demonstrated beneficial effects for those suffering from anxiety, high blood pressure, and heart problems, and in the long term practitioners show a lower incidence of atheroma, osteoporosis, and spinal problems when compared with a matched control group.
| 太極拳 | |
|---|---|
| Yang Chengfu in a posture from the Tai Chi solo form known as Single Whip, circa 1918 | |
| Chinese Name | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Tàijíquán |
| Wade-Giles | T'ai Ch'üan2 |
| Simplified Chinese | 太极拳 |
| Traditional Chinese | 太極拳 |
| Cantonese | taai3 gik6 kyun4 |
| Japanese Hiragana | たいきょくけん |
| Korean | 태극권 |
| Vietnamese | Thái Cực Quyền |
Variations of T'ai Chi Ch'uan's basic training forms are well known as the slow motion routines that groups of people practice every morning in parks across China and other parts of the world. Traditional T'ai Chi training is intended to teach awareness of one's own balance and what affects it, awareness of the same in others, an appreciation of the practical value in one's ability to moderate extremes of behavior and attitude at both mental and physical levels, and how this applies to effective self-defense principles.
Overview
Historically, T'ai Chi Ch'uan has been regarded as a martial art, and its traditional practitioners still teach it as one. Some call it a form of moving meditation, and T'ai Chi theory and practice evolved in agreement with many of the principles of traditional Chinese medicine. Besides general health benefits and stress management attributed to beginning and intermediate level T'ai Chi training, many therapeutic interventions along the lines of traditional Chinese medicine are taught to advanced T'ai Chi students.
The physical training of T'ai Chi Ch'uan is described in the writings of its older schools as being characterized by the use of leverage through the joints based on coordination in relaxation, rather than muscular tension, in order to neutralize or initiate physical attacks.
The study of T'ai Chi Ch'üan involves three primary subjects:
Health- an unhealthy or otherwise uncomfortable person will find it difficult to meditate to a state of calmness or to use T'ai Chi as a martial art. T'ai Chi's health training therefore concentrates on relieving the physical effects of stress on the body and mind. Meditation- the focus meditation and subsequent calmness cultivated by the meditative aspect of T'ai Chi is seen as necessary to maintain optimum health (in the sense of effectively maintaining stress relief or homeostasis) and in order to use it as a soft style martial art. Martial art- the ability to competently use T'ai Chi as a martial art is said to be proof that the health and meditation aspects are working according to the dictates of the theory of T'ai Chi Ch'üan.The Mandarin term "T'ai Chi Ch'uan" translates as "Supreme Ultimate Boxing" or "Boundless Fist". T'ai Chi training involves learning solo routines, known as forms, and two person routines, known as pushing hands, as well as acupressure-related manipulations taught by traditional schools. T'ai Chi Ch'uan is seen by many of its schools as a variety of Taoism, and it does seemingly incorporate many Taoist principles into its practice (see below). The explanation given by the traditional T'ai Chi family schools for why so many of their previous generations have dedicated their lives to the study and preservation of the art is that the discipline it seems to give its students to dramatically improve the effects of stress in their lives, with a few years of hard work, should hold a useful purpose for people living in a stressful world. They say that once the T'ai Chi principles have been understood and internalized into the bodily framework the practitioner will have an immediately accessible "toolkit" thereby to improve and then maintain their health, to provide a meditative focus, and that can work as an effective and subtle martial art for self-defense.
Orthodox T'ai Chi schools say the study of T'ai Chi Ch'uan is studying how to change appropriately in response to outside forces.
Wu Chien-ch'üan, co-founder of the Wu family style, described the name T'ai Chi Ch'üan this way at the beginning of the 20th century:
"Various people have offered different explanations for the name T'ai Chi Ch'uan.Training and techniques
As the name T'ai Chi Ch'üan is held to be derived from the T'ai Chi symbol, the taijitu or t'ai chi t'u (太極圖, pinyin tàijítú), commonly known in the West as the "yin-yang" diagram, T'ai Chi Ch'üan techniques are said therefore to physically and energetically balance yin (receptive) and yang (active) principles: "From ultimate softness comes ultimate hardness." Pushing hands is seen as necessary not only for training the self-defense skills of a soft style such as T'ai Chi by demonstrating the forms' movement principles experientially, but also it is said to improve upon the level of conditioning provided by practice of the solo forms by increasing the workload on students while they practice those movement principles. The major traditional styles of T'ai Chi have forms which differ somewhat cosmetically, but there are also many obvious similarities which point to their common origin. Such injury, according to T'ai Chi theory, is a natural consequence of meeting brute force with brute force. The collision of two like forces, yang with yang, is known as "double-weighted" in T'ai Chi terminology. Done correctly, achieving this yin/yang or yang/yin balance in combat (and, by extension, other areas of one's life) is known as being "single-weighted" and is a primary goal of T'ai Chi Ch'üan training. A T'ai Chi student has to be well conditioned by many years of disciplined training;
T'ai Chi's martial aspect relies on sensitivity to the opponent's movements and centre of gravity dictating appropriate responses. Effectively affecting or "capturing" the opponent's centre of gravity immediately upon contact is trained as the primary goal of the martial T'ai Chi student, and from there all other technique can follow with seeming effortlessness. T'ai Chi Ch'üan trains in three basic ranges, close, medium and long, and then everything in between. Most T'ai Chi teachers expect their students to thoroughly learn defensive or neutralizing skills first, and a student will have to demonstrate proficiency with them before offensive skills will be extensively trained.
Styles and history
There are five major styles of T'ai Chi Ch'üan, each named after the Chinese family from whom they originated:
Chen style(陳氏) and its close cousin Zhaobao style(趙堡忽靈架) Yang style(楊氏) Wu or Wu/Hao style of Wu Yu-hsiang (Wu Yuxiang)(武氏) Wu style of Wu Ch'uan-yü (Wu Quanyuo) and Wu Chien-ch'uan (Wu Jianquan)(吳氏) Sun style(孫氏)The order of seniority is as listed above.
In the modern world there are now dozens of new styles, hybrid styles and offshoots of the main styles, but the five family schools are the groups recognised by the international community as being orthodox. For example, there are several groups teaching what they call Wu Tang style T'ai Chi Ch'üan (武當式太極拳).
The designation Wu Tang Ch'üan is also used to broadly distinguish internal or nei chia martial arts (said to be a specialty of the monasteries at Wu Tang Shan) from what are known as the external or wai chia styles based on the Shaolinquan styles, although that distinction is sometimes disputed by modern schools. In this broad sense, among many T'ai Chi schools all styles of T'ai Chi (as well as related arts such as Pa Kua Chang and Hsing-i Ch'üan) are therefore considered to be "Wu Tang style" martial arts. The schools that designate themselves "Wu Tang style" relative to the family styles mentioned above mostly claim to teach an "original style" they say was formulated by a Taoist monk called Zhang Sanfeng and taught by him in the Taoist monasteries at Wu Tang Shan. Some consider that what is practised under that name today may be a modern back-formation based on stories and popular veneration of Zhang Sanfeng (see below) as well as the martial fame of the Wu Tang monastery (there are many other martial art styles historically associated with Wu Tang besides T'ai Chi).
When tracing T'ai Chi Ch'üan's formative influences to Taoist and Buddhist monasteries, one has little more to go on than legendary tales from a modern historical perspective, but T'ai Chi Ch'üan's practical connection to and dependence upon the theories of Sung dynasty Neo-Confucianism (a conscious synthesis of Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian traditions, esp. The philosophical and political landscape of that time in Chinese history is fairly well documented, even if the origin of the art later to become known as T'ai Chi Ch'üan in it is not. T'ai Chi Ch'üan's theories and practice are therefore believed by some schools to have been formulated by the Taoist monk Zhang Sanfeng in the 12th century, at about the same time that the principles of the Neo-Confucian school were making themselves felt in Chinese intellectual life. Therefore the didactic story is told that Zhang Sanfeng as a young man studied Tao Yin (導引, Pinyin dǎoyǐn) breathing exercises from his Taoist teachers and martial arts at the Buddhist Shaolin monastery, eventually combining the martial forms and breathing exercises to formulate the soft or internal principles we associate with T'ai Chi Ch'üan and related martial arts. Wang Zongyue* T'AI CHI CH'ÜAN | 1989 42 Competition Form (Wushu competition form combined from Sun, Wu, Chen, and Yang styles)
Notes to Family tree table
Names denoted by an asterisk are legendary or semilegendary figures in the lineage, which means their involvement in the lineage, while accepted by most of the major schools, isn't independently verifiable from known historical records.
The Cheng Man-ch'ing and Chinese Sports Commission short forms are said to be derived from Yang family forms, but neither are recognized as Yang family T'ai Chi Ch'üan by current Yang family teachers.
Modern T'ai Chi
T'ai Chi has become very popular in the last twenty years or so, as the baby boomers age and T'ai Chi's reputation for ameliorating the effects of aging becomes more well-known. Hospitals, clinics, community and senior centers are all hosting T'ai Chi classes in communities around the world. As a result of this popularity, there has been some divergence between those who say they practice T'ai Chi primarily for fighting, those who practice it for its aesthetic appeal (as in the shortened, modern, theatrical "Taijiquan" forms of wushu, see below), and those who are more interested in its benefits to physical and mental health. More traditional stylists still see the two aspects of health and martial arts as equally necessary pieces of the puzzle, the yin and yang of T'ai Chi Ch'üan. The T'ai Chi "family" schools therefore still present their teachings in a martial art context even though the majority of their students nowadays profess that they are primarily interested in training for the claimed health benefits. Since there is no universal certification process and most Westerners haven't seen very much T'ai Chi and don't know what to look for, practically anyone can learn or even make up a few moves and call themselves a teacher. Relatively few of these teachers even know that there are martial applications to the T'ai Chi forms. If they do teach self-defense, it is often a mixture of motions which the teachers think look like T'ai Chi Ch'üan with some other system. While this phenomenon may have made some external aspects of T'ai Chi available for a wider audience, the traditional T'ai Chi family schools see the martial focus as a fundamental part of their training, both for health and self-defense purposes. They claim that while the students may not need to practice martial applications themselves to derive a benefit from T'ai Chi training, they assert that T'ai Chi teachers at least should know the martial applications to ensure that the movements they teach are done correctly and safely by their students. For these reasons they claim that a school not teaching those aspects somewhere in their syllabus cannot be said to be actually teaching the art itself, and will be much less likely to be able to reproduce the full health benefits that made T'ai Chi's reputation in the first place.
Sport competition
In order to standardize T'ai Chi Ch'uan for wushu tournament judging, and because many of the family T'ai Chi Ch'uan teachers had either moved out of China or had been forced to stop teaching after the Communist regime was established in 1949, the government sponsored Chinese Sports Committee brought together four of their wushu teachers to truncate the Yang family hand form to 24 postures in 1956. They wanted to somehow retain the look of T'ai Chi Ch'uan but make an easy to remember routine that was less difficult to teach and much less difficult to learn than longer (generally 88 to 108 posture) classical solo hand forms. As T'ai Chi again became popular on the Mainland, more competitive forms were developed to be completed within a 6 minute time limit. All sets of forms thus created were named after their style, e.g., the Ch'en Style National Competition Form is the 56 Forms, and so on.
These modern versions of T'ai Chi Ch'uan (almost always listed using the pinyin romanisation Taijiquan) have since become an integral part of international wushu tournament competition, and have been featured in several popular Chinese movies starring or choreographed by well known wushu competitors, such as Jet Li and Donnie Yen.
In the 11th Asian Games of 1990, wushu was included as an item for competition for the first time with the 42 Form being chosen to represent T'ai Chi.
Health benefits
Researchers have found that long-term T'ai Chi practice had favorable effects on the promotion of balance control, flexibility and cardiovascular fitness and reduced the risk of falls in elders. Patients also benefited from T'ai Chi who suffered from heart failure, high blood pressure, heart attacks, arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
T'ai Chi has also been shown to reduce the symptoms of young Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) sufferers. T'ai Chi's gentle, low impact, movements surprisingly burn more calories than surfing and nearly as many as downhill skiing. T'ai Chi also boosts aspects of the immune system's function very significantly, and has been shown to reduce the incidence of anxiety, depression, and overall mood disturbance. (See research citations listed below.)
A pilot study has found evidence that T'ai Chi and related qigong helps reduce the severity of diabetes. Intense T'ai Chi exercise training and fall occurrences in older, transitionally frail adults: a randomized, controlled trial. PMID 15006825 Search a listing of articles relating to the FICSIT trials and T'ai Chi Hernandez-Reif, M., Field, T.M., & Movement Therapies, 5(2):120-3, 2001 Apr, 5(23 ref), 120-123 Calorie Burning Chart Tai Chi boosts T-Cell counts in immune system Tai Chi, depression, anxiety, and mood disturbance (American Psychological Association) Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 1989 Vol 33 (2) 197-206 A comprehensive listing of Tai Chi medical research links References to medical publications Tai Chi a promising remedy for diabetes, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 20 December, 2005 - Pilot study of Qigong and tai chi in diabetes sufferers.
External links to videos of representatives of each of the 5 family styles
Chen Shitong's Chen style Yang Shouzhong's Yang style Hao Shaoru's Wu Yuxiang (Wu/Hao) style Wu Yinghua's Wu Jianquan style Sun Jianyun's Sun style
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